Part 5

So, my gentle gazelles, thar’s my answer, And here stays Banty Tim: He trumped Death’s ace for me that day, And I’m not goin’ back on him! You may rezoloot till the cows come home, But ef one of you tetches the boy, He’ll wrastle his hash to-night in hell, Or my name’s not Tilmon Joy!

_Bret Harte_

(Francis) Bret Harte was born August 25, 1839, at Albany, New York. His childhood was spent in various cities of the East. Late in 1853 his widowed mother went to California with a party of relatives, and two months later, when he was fifteen, Bret Harte and his sister followed. He dreamed even at this age of being a poet. During the next few years he was engaged in school-teaching, typesetting, politics, mining and journalism, becoming editor of _The Overland Monthly_ at San Francisco in 1868.

Harte’s fame came suddenly. Late in the sixties he had written a burlesque in rhyme of two Western gamblers trying to fleece a guileless Chinaman who claimed to know nothing about cards but who, it turned out, was scarcely as innocent as he appeared. Harte, in the midst of writing serious poetry, had put the verses aside as too crude and trifling for publication. Some time later, just as _The Overland Monthly_ was going to press, it was discovered that the form was one page short. Having nothing else on hand, Harte had these rhymes set up. Instead of passing unnoticed, the poem was quoted everywhere; it swept the West and captivated the East. When _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ followed, Harte became not only a national but an international figure. England acclaimed him and _The Atlantic Monthly_ paid him $10,000 to write for a year in his Pike County vein.

_East and West Poems_ appeared in 1871; in 1872 he published an enlarged _Poetical Works_ including many earlier pieces. His scores of short stories represent Harte at his best; “M’liss,” “Tennessee’s Partner,” “The Outcast of Poker Flat”—these are the work of a lesser, transplanted Dickens. His novels are of minor importance; they are carelessly constructed, theatrically conceived; his characters are little more than badly-wired marionettes that betray every movement made by their manipulator.

In 1872 Harte, encouraged by his success, returned to his native East; in 1878 he went to Germany as consul. Two years later he was transferred to Scotland and, after five years there, went to London, where he remained the rest of his life. Harte’s later period remains mysteriously shrouded. He never came back to America, not even for a visit; he ceased to correspond with his family; he separated himself from all the most intimate associations of his early life. He died, suddenly, at Camberley, England, May 6, 1902.

“JIM”

Say there! P’r’aps Some on you chaps Might know Jim Wild? Well,—no offense: Thar ain’t no sense In gittin’ riled! Jim was my chum Up on the Bar: That’s why I come Down from up yar, Lookin’ for Jim. Thank ye, sir! _You_ Ain’t of that crew,— Blest if you are! Money? Not much: That ain’t my kind; I ain’t no such. Rum? I don’t mind, Seein’ it’s you. Well, this yer Jim,— Did you know him? Jes’ ’bout your size; Same kind of eyes;— Well, that is strange: Why, it’s two year Since he came here, Sick, for a change. Well, here’s to us: Eh? The h—— you say! Dead? That little cuss? What makes you star’, You over thar? Can’t a man drop ’s glass in yer shop But you must r’ar? It wouldn’t take D——d much to break You and your bar.

Dead! Poor—little—Jim! Why, thar was me, Jones, and Bob Lee, Harry and Ben,— No-account men: Then to take _him_!

Well, thar—Good-by. No more, sir—I— Eh? What’s that you say? Why, dern it!—sho!— No? Yes! By Joe! Sold! Sold! Why, you limb, You ornery, Derned, old, Long-legged Jim.

PLAIN LANGUAGE FROM TRUTHFUL JAMES

(_Table Mountain, 1870_)

Which I wish to remark, And my language is plain, That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar, Which the same I would rise to explain.

Ah Sin was his name; And I shall not deny, In regard to the same, What that name might imply; But his smile it was pensive and childlike, As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.

It was August the third, And quite soft was the skies; Which it might be inferred That Ah Sin was likewise; Yet he played it that day upon William And me in a way I despise.

Which we had a small game, And Ah Sin took a hand: It was Euchre. The same He did not understand; But he smiled as he sat by the table, With a smile that was childlike and bland. Yet the cards they were stocked In a way that I grieve, And my feelings were shocked At the state of Nye’s sleeve, Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, And the same with intent to deceive.

But the hands that were played By that heathen Chinee, And the points that he made, Were quite frightful to see,— Till at last he put down a right bower, Which the same Nye had dealt unto me!

Then I looked up at Nye, And he gazed upon me; And he rose with a sigh, And said, “Can this be? We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,”— And he went for that heathen Chinee.

In the scene that ensued I did not take a hand, But the floor it was strewed Like the leaves on the strand With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding, In the game “he did not understand.”

In his sleeves, which were long, He had twenty-four packs,— Which was coming it strong, Yet I state but the facts; And we found on his nails, which were taper, What is frequent in tapers,—that’s wax.

Which is why I remark, And my language is plain, That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar,— Which the same I am free to maintain.

_Joaquin Miller_

Cincinnatus (Heine) Miller, or, to give him the name he adopted, Joaquin Miller, was born in 1841 of immigrant parents. As he himself writes, “My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio.” When Miller was twelve, his family left the mid-West with “two big heavily laden wagons, with eight yoke of oxen to each, a carriage and two horses for mother and baby sister, and a single horse for the three boys to ride.” The distance covered in their cross-country exodus (they took a roundabout route to Oregon) was nearly three thousand miles. The time consumed, he records, “was seven months and five days. There were no bridges, no railroad levels, nothing of the sort.... Many times, at night, after ascending a stream to find a ford, we could look back and see our smouldering camp-fires of the day before.” This journey made a lasting impression on the boy’s impressionable mind; it was this tortuous wandering that gave Miller his reverence for the spaciousness and glory of the West in general and the pioneer in particular. After two years in the Oregon home, he ran away to find gold.

At fifteen we find Miller living with the Indians as one of them; in 1859 (at the age of eighteen) he attends a missionschool “college” in Eugene, Oregon; between 1860 and 1865 he is express-messenger, editor of a pacifist newspaper that is suppressed for opposing the Civil War, lawyer and, occasionally, a poet. He holds a minor judgeship from 1866 to 1870.

His first book (_Specimens_) appears in 1868, his second (_Joaquin et al._, from which he took his name) in 1869. No response—not even from “the bards of San Francisco Bay” to whom he had dedicated the latter volume. He is chagrined, discouraged, angry. He resolves to quit America, to go to the land that has always been the nursing-ground of poets. “Three months later, September 1, 1870, I was kneeling at the grave of Burns. I really expected to die there in the land of my fathers.” He arrives in London, unheralded, unknown. He takes his manuscripts to one publisher after another with the same negative result. Finally, with a pioneer desperation, he prints privately one hundred copies of his _Pacific Poems_, sending them out for review. Sensation! The reversal of Miller’s fortunes is one of the most startling in all literature. He becomes famous overnight. He is fêted, lauded, lionized; he is ranked as an equal of Browning, given a dinner by the Pre-Raphaelites, acclaimed as “the great interpreter of America,” “the Bryon of Oregon”!

His dramatic success in England is easily explained. He brought to the calm air of literary London, a breath of the great winds of the plain. The more he exaggerated his crashing effects, the louder he roared, the better the English public liked it. When he entered Victorian parlors in his velvet jacket, hip-boots and flowing hair, childhood visions of the “wild and woolly Westerner” were realized and the very bombast of his work was glorified as “typically American.”

And yet, for all his overstressed muscularity, Miller is strangely lacking in creative energy. His exuberance and whipped up rhetoric cannot disguise the essential weakness of his verse. It is, in spite of a certain breeziness and a few magnificent descriptions of cañons and mountain-chains, feeble as well as false, full of cheap heroics, atrocious taste and impossible men and women. (See Preface.) One or two individual poems, like “Crossing the Plains” and parts of his apostrophes to the Sierras, the Pacific Ocean and the Missouri river may live; the rest seem doomed to a gradual extinction.

From 1872 to 1886, Miller traveled about the Continent. In 1887 he returned to California, dwelling on the Heights, helping to found an experimental Greek academy for aspiring writers. He died there, after a determinedly picturesque life, in sight of the Golden Gate, in 1913.

BY THE PACIFIC OCEAN[2]

Here room and kingly silence keep Companionship in state austere; The dignity of death is here, The large, lone vastness of the deep. Here toil has pitched his camp to rest: The west is banked against the west.

Above yon gleaming skies of gold One lone imperial peak is seen; While gathered at his feet in green Ten thousand foresters are told. And all so still! so still the air That duty drops the web of care. Beneath the sunset’s golden sheaves The awful deep walks with the deep, Where silent sea-doves slip and sweep, And commerce keeps her loom and weaves. The dead red men refuse to rest; Their ghosts illume my lurid West.

CROSSING THE PLAINS[3]

What great yoked brutes with briskets low, With wrinkled necks like buffalo, With round, brown, liquid, pleading eyes, That turn’d so slow and sad to you, That shone like love’s eyes soft with tears, That seem’d to plead, and make replies, The while they bow’d their necks and drew The creaking load; and looked at you. Their sable briskets swept the ground, Their cloven feet kept solemn sound.

Two sullen bullocks led the line, Their great eyes shining bright like wine; Two sullen captive kings were they, That had in time held herds at bay, And even now they crush’d the sod With stolid sense of majesty, And stately stepp’d and stately trod, As if ’twere something still to be Kings even in captivity.

FROM “_BYRON_”

In men whom men condemn as ill I find so much of goodness still, In men whom men pronounce divine I find so much of sin and blot, I do not dare to draw a line Between the two, where God has not.

_Edward Rowland Sill_

Edward Rowland Sill was born at Windsor, Connecticut, in 1841. In 1861 he was graduated from Yale and shortly thereafter his poor health compelled him West. After various unsuccessful experiments, he drifted into teaching, first in the high schools in Ohio, later in the English department of the University of California. His uncertain physical condition added to his mental uncertainty. Unable to ally himself either with the lethargic, conservative forces whom he hated or with the radicals whom he distrusted, Sill became an uncomfortable solitary; half rebellious, half resigned. During the last decade of his life, his brooding seriousness was less pronounced, a lighter irony took the place of his dark reflections.

_The Hermitage_, his first volume, was published in 1867, a later edition (including later poems) appearing in 1889. His two posthumous books are _Poems_ (1887) and _Hermione and Other Poems_ (1899).

Sill died, after bringing something of the Eastern culture to the West, in 1887.

SOLITUDE

All alone—alone, Calm, as on a kingly throne, Take thy place in the crowded land, Self-centred in free self-command. Let thy manhood leave behind The narrow ways of the lesser mind: What to thee are its little cares, The feeble love or the spite it bears?

Let the noisy crowd go by: In thy lonely watch on high, Far from the chattering tongues of men, Sitting above their call or ken, Free from links of manner and form Thou shalt learn of the wingéd storm— God shall speak to thee out of the sky.

DARE YOU?

Doubting Thomas and loving John, Behind the others walking on:—

“Tell me now, John, dare you be One of the minority? To be lonely in your thought, Never visited nor sought, Shunned with secret shrug, to go Thro’ the world, esteemed its foe; To be singled out and hissed, Pointed at as one unblessed, Warned against in whispers faint, Lest the children catch a taint; To bear off your titles well,— Heretic and infidel? If you dare, come now with me, Fearless, confident, and free.”

“Thomas, do you dare to be Of the great majority? To be only, as the rest, With Heaven’s creature comforts blessed; To accept, in humble part, Truth that shines on every heart; Never to be set on high, Where the envious curses fly; Never name or fame to find, Still outstripped in soul and mind; To be hid, unless to God, As one grass-blade in the sod, Underfoot with millions trod? If you dare, come with us, be Lost in love’s great unity.”

_Sidney Lanier_

Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. His was a family of musicians (Lanier himself was a skilful performer on various instruments), and it is not surprising that his verse emphasizes—even overstresses—the influence of music on poetry. He attended Oglethorpe College, graduating at the age of eighteen (1860), and, a year later, volunteered as a private in the Confederate army. After several months’ imprisonment (he had been captured while acting as signal officer on a blockade-runner), Lanier was released in February, 1865, returning from Point Lookout to Georgia on foot, accompanied only by his flute, from which he refused to be separated. His physical health, never the most robust, had been frightfully impaired by his incarceration, and he was already suffering from tuberculosis, the rest of his life being spent in an unequal struggle against it.

He was now only twenty-three years old and the problem of choosing a vocation was complicated by his marriage in 1867. He spent five years in the study and practice of law, during which time he wrote comparatively little verse. But the law could not hold him; he felt premonitions of death and realized he must devote his talents to art before it was too late. He was fortunate enough to obtain a position as flautist with the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in 1873 in Baltimore, where he had free access to the music and literature he craved. Here he wrote all of his best poetry. In 1879, he was made lecturer on English in Johns Hopkins University, and it was for his courses there that he wrote his chief prose work, a brilliant if not conclusive study, _The Science of English Verse_. Besides his poetry, he wrote several books for boys, the two most popular being _The Boy’s Froissart_ (1878) and _The Boy’s King Arthur_ (1880).

Lanier’s poetry, charming though most of it is, suffers from his all too frequent theorizing, his too conscious effort to bring verse over into the province of pure music. He thought almost entirely, even in his most intellectual conceptions, in terms of musical form. His main theory that English verse has for its essential basis not _accent_ but a strict musical _quantity_ is a wholly erroneous conclusion, possible only to one who could write “whatever turn I have for art is purely musical—poetry being with me a mere tangent into which I shoot.” Lanier is at his best in his ballads, although a few of his lyrics have a similar spontaneity. In spite of the fact that he had rather novel schemes of rhythm and stanza-structure, much of his work is marred by strained effects, elaborate conceits and a kind of verse that approaches mere pattern-making. But such a vigorous ballad as “The Song of the Chattahoochee,” lyrics like “Night and Day” and “The Stirrup Cup,” and parts of the symphonic “Hymns of the Marshes” are sure of a place in American literature. Never a great figure, he was one of the most interesting and spiritual of our minor poets.

Lanier died, a victim of his disease, in the mountains of North Carolina, September 7, 1881.

SONG OF THE CHATTAHOOCHEE[4]

Out of the hills of Habersham, Down the valleys of Hall, I hurry amain to reach the plain, Run the rapid and leap the fall, Split at the rock and together again, Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, And flee from folly on every side With a lover’s pain to attain the plain Far from the hills of Habersham, Far from the valleys of Hall.

All down the hills of Habersham, All through the valleys of Hall, The rushes cried _Abide, abide_, The willful waterweeds held me thrall, The laving laurel turned my tide, The ferns and the fondling grass said _Stay_, The dewberry dipped for to work delay, And the little reeds sighed _Abide, abide, Here in the hills of Habersham, Here in the valleys of Hall_.

High o’er the hills of Habersham, Veiling the valleys of Hall, The hickory told me manifold Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall Wrought me her shadowy self to hold, The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine, Overleaning, with flickering meaning and sign, Said, _Pass not, so cold, these manifold Deep shades of the hills of Habersham, These glades in the valleys of Hall_.

And oft in the hills of Habersham, And oft in the valleys of Hall, The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl, And many a luminous jewel lone —Crystals clear or acloud with mist, Ruby, garnet and amethyst— Made lures with the lights of streaming stone In the clefts of the hills of Habersham, In the beds of the valleys of Hall.

But oh, not the hills of Habersham, And oh, not the valleys of Hall Avail: I am fain for to water the plain. Downward the voices of Duty call— Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main, The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn, And a myriad flowers mortally yearn, And the lordly main from beyond the plain Calls o’er the hills of Habersham, Calls through the valleys of Hall.

NIGHT AND DAY[5]

The innocent, sweet Day is dead. Dark Night hath slain her in her bed. O, Moors are as fierce to kill as to wed! —Put out the light, said he.

A sweeter light than ever rayed From star of heaven or eye of maid Has vanished in the unknown Shade —She’s dead, she’s dead, said he.

Now, in a wild, sad after-mood The tawny Night sits still to brood Upon the dawn-time when he wooed —I would she lived, said he.

Star-memories of happier times, Of loving deeds and lovers’ rhymes, Throng forth in silvery pantomimes. —Come back, O Day! said he.

FROM “THE MARSHES OF GLYNN”[6]